Viewpoints of nursing and para-medical students about the features of a good university lecturer

Introduction: Since teachers play an important role in education, thus, the higher educationorganizations have items to evaluate their performance to promote the quality of education todetermine the characteristics of a good teacher. This study was performed to evaluate the opinions ofstudents in Semnan university of medical sciences about the features of a good academic lecturer.Materials and Methods: This analytical-descriptive study was performed on 133 para-medical andnursing students. A two-part questionnaire containing 24 features of a good educator was given tostudents. In this questionnaire, reliability and validity was considered and the students’ view wasasked in the scale of Likert measuring attitude in the form of without importance, low importance,nearly important, important, and too important. Then, these features were categorized in the fields ofresearch, methodology of teaching, in dividable character, and communication ability.Results: 76% of students were females and 53.4% were studying for B.S. degree. The mostimportant features obtained in this study were proficiency on the course, fluency in speech, organizingthe contents and having interest to teaching. On the other hand, decisiveness of teacher, having interestto research and the teaching experience were those items that had the least important for students. Inaddition, the results showed that there was a significant relation between the gender and the teacher’spersonality features (P=0.025).Conclusion: According to the results, proficiency on the course, fluency in speech and havinginterest in teaching are the items that in selecting the teachers should be considered. Therefore, itseems some workshops are necessary for university lecturers about how to organize the contents,teaching methodology, and how to communicate with others in order to improve the quality ofteaching and learning.